


feet in the tide, nails in the bank

by Stacicity



Category: The Silt Verses (Podcast)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:14:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29536665
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stacicity/pseuds/Stacicity
Summary: Notes on a childhood faith by Sister Carpenter
Kudos: 12





	feet in the tide, nails in the bank

**Author's Note:**

> The Silt Verses has taken over my brain and this is some rambling that came out of it

The thing is, if Nana Glass had had her way, Carpenter would have grown up a devout and open worshipper. She’d have followed the old ways with Em, hand in hand at the river’s edge, singing the old songs, observing the old practices. 

The thing is, by the time Carpenter and Em arrived, the Saint Electric had a watchful lens over even their quiet little waterways. The lobstermen and fisherfolk had long since diverted their focus to more colourful, commercial gods (Duke of the Silver Tides, the Marsh Baron, Scarlet Jess of the Cage). Nana Glass’ church had been a solitary endeavour for decades; with the arrival of Carpenter and Em, it became a church of three.

The thing is, Carpenter spent most of her childhood with only one perspective on what it was to be a worshipper of their river—of her river. Nana Glass’ respect for tradition was written on her skin, pierced through her cheeks and her ears and her lips. Carpenter knew no other way of worshipping, and she never doubted.

Except that children doubt, always, whether they realise it or not. Children and adults—she’s often said, she’s always known—hold different forms of faith

These are the tenets of growing up on the river as told by Nana Glass, the reminiscences of a woman so old and careworn and craggy that Carpenter still, to this day, cannot imagine what she must have looked like when she was younger. Even if sometimes she looks in the mirror in whatever motel she’s sheltering in and sees a hint of that hardness around her own mouth. A glint, maybe, in her eye, as of a hook under water. 

The first thing Carpenter learned was that the river was a giver and taker of life, and from the first glint of life, it demanded due sacrifice. Children on the riversides in Nana’s day were cleansed in its black and fast-moving depths scarcely before they’d drawn their first breaths, washing placental blood and mucus off downstream, their first of many sacrifices to the Trawler Man. And after that first plunge into the freezing depths, no true worshipper would willingly swim in the river again.

It wasn’t that they were afraid of it, per se; children back then learned to sail before they could walk. One of Carpenter’s first memories is bobbing on the water in Nana Glass’ little rowboat, watching the river weeds reach out to her with thin and grasping hands. The river is their lifeblood, the pulsing and essential artery through the marshy flesh of the land on which they live. It’s just that they don’t _swim_ in it. What arrogance, what hubris, to immerse oneself in the maw of such a hungry thing as a god. With gods, sometimes, it’s best to keep one’s distance. Avert your eyes, lift your hands, place a screen of wood or metal between your heart and the god that would eat it (as is its right, as is its right, as is its right). 

Carpenter, of course, taught herself to swim. She did so privately, furtively, as a blasphemy, as a secret act of heretical worship, the water lapping at her shoulders as she learned to keep her head above it by the grace of her quiet and unseen god. But most worshippers can swim, she finds, and she wonders whether her own secret, guilty little blasphemy isn’t a good deal more common than she’d imagined. 

What goes into the river comes out different. The most banal ways are the loveliest, the _friendliest_ demonstrations. Back in the old days, Nana says, before the Saint Electric was strung across the world in iron and steel, there were shrines to the river that would have little sacrifices. Stones worn smooth. Glass shards rounded and curved and dulled by the unceasing caress of the water. Sometimes a sheep’s skull cleaned of its flesh. The river takes, the river gives. 

There are other demonstrations.

Some worshippers would stand in the marsh with the river lapping gently at their toes, and listen, and pray. They would stand there for a day, a night, a day after, a night after, until their face was drawn with hunger and they had sunk knee-deep into the sucking mud. 

One could drown them, of course, if one intended a sacrifice—weight them, tie them, send them sinking. But it was always more meaningful to let the river _take_ them, to shift the ground beneath their feet and drive them down, inch by inch, water spilling around their toes, their knees, their hips. Unbound, except by the dirt. Unscreaming, even as their breathing grew more ragged. Their eyes would roll back and their breathing would slow—a breath in for high tide, groaning and rattling—a breath out for low tide, whistling between their teeth.

And after a few days, perhaps, the river would decide it had fed enough and Nana describes watching two strong-backed sons pull their father out, watching the skin slough roughly from his legs in oily chunks, leaving something slick and shining like sealskin in its place, tender to the touch, sensitive to the sun. 

If gods intend mercy, they’re not very good at it. 

When Carpenter was very small, Nana told her about finding something buried in the bog, not far from the glistening strip of the water itself. She’d wound a rope around it—something hard, blunt-edged, odd-shaped—and heaved, pulling something live and twitching from the embrace of the dirt. A lamb, Nana thought, but—no, even after the mud slipped from where fleece should be there was just odd, leathery skin, peat-black, the limbs too thin and too rubbery to be properly boned, the wind ruffling the presence of new gills at the neck, and embedded within the centre of its forehead one white, fish-like eye.

Nana had stared at it, and it had stared back with its opal eye even as the mud reclaimed its hooves and dragged it back down into the silt. 

At least it was only a lamb. Carpenter has heard stories of what it can be like when the things that were once people are uncovered from the marsh—blind, their eye sockets grown over with skin, their numerous armoured legs skittering on all sides of a pale and bloodless torso, their mouths opening, opening, opening, to grasp whatever next grows closest. 

The Trawler-Man is not the only river god, nor the only water god. Carpenter knows enough to be familiar with the salt-flecked, unmoored worshippers of the sea, their flighty ways, their quickness to anger. The sea takes, it takes, it takes, and every fish from its belly is a fish _stolen_. It is only the river that returns. The Trawler-Man pulls things in to give them back to pull them in to give them back. The Trawler-Man skims the surface for now, because the surface is always rising as the river reclaims. One day the river will rise, and the Trawler-Man will skim the surface of the sky instead.

“Back in the old days,” Nana used to snap when one of Carpenter or Em (or, likely, both) were misbehaving, “one of you would have been fed to the water by now.” They’d been gleeful about it at the time, shrieking with terrified laughter, half-hoping and half-dreading that Nana would tell them again about the village of faithless swallowed by the river; about houses on stilts snapped at their roots by a swelling flood and tumbling, legless, into the waters beneath; about the crabs that would close their pincers around the mud-soaked wings of stranded birds and drag them into the depths. 

Carpenter used to dream about being given to the river, left with a sack over her head and her arms tied to a stake, prayer symbols scratched into the stake, into her skin. She’d learned prayer symbols before the alphabet, scratching them into the dust outside of Nana’s house with a stick, hastily brushed away before anybody could see. Leave no trace. Wipe it clean. The river would rise and pour itself into her mouth and her ears and her nose, and her stomach would bloat, and the teeth and pincers of the things that lived in the mud would pull her apart for a remaking. 

It won’t be painless when the river comes and your stomach bloats and your skin sags uselessly about your bones—these are the things that are whispered amongst the faithful. It won’t be painless when the river takes you, no. But it won’t hurt for long. 

Faulkner probably imagines it to be a sort of religious ecstasy, Carpenter thinks bitterly, as if one fish feels ecstasy in the mouth of another. As if the pain isn’t the _point_. Even when the river gives gifts, releasing a new season of jade and turquoise dragonflies from its surface, the dragonflies tear themselves from their old skin. 

The pain is the point. It’s why her own numbness terrifies her so much. She is not afraid of pain, but she doesn’t feel it, _hasn’t_ felt it for a long time. The wind chaps her cheeks and she feels herself withering, curling inwards, drying out even in the belly of the riverlands. 

Perhaps it’s a rebirth of its own. Perhaps she’ll burst free in pain and blood and anguish into something better, something new. Perhaps she has been abandoned, as she abandons the prayer chalk and the board that have been her companions since before she can remember. 

She is afraid, she is afraid, she is afraid like a child, except this time there’s no horrified delight behind it, no Em to chase and be chased by, to taunt and reflect her fear onto. There’s just Faulkner’s easy devotion to their god and his clumsy, awful piety. 

He intends to make a sacrifice of her, she’s sure, no matter his talk of friendship or getting to know her _calling_ , as if he could ever understand. Perhaps she could fight him off. Perhaps she could run from him, and make good her escape, sensing his footsteps long before he sensed hers. But if he succeeded, if he tied her to a stake and carved prayers into her skin, she is afraid not of the end, not of the pain, but of its absence. She is afraid that she won’t be taken. 

**Author's Note:**

> Kudos & comments feed my filthy ways. [Find me on tumblr](https://ajcrawly.tumblr.com) and shout at me about the Saint Electric.


End file.
